Riding a fashion wave - Splash beachwear stores in St. Louis, MO - Brief Article - Company Profile

Nation's Business, Dec, 1996 by Cheryl Jarvis

Kyrle Boldt was a high-school junior in St. Louis when he headed to Orlando, Fla., over spring break to attend water-skiing school. When he came home wearing the bright beach shorts he had bought on his trip, his friends all had the same question: "Where can I get a pair of those?"

Boldt headed back to Florida in December; this time, he checked out all the surf shops when he wasn't water-skiing. At a family gathering a few weeks later, he announced that he wanted to open a surf shop, one specializing in beachwear.

"In St. Louis? Are you crazy?" exclaimed his older sister, Joni. Only his mom, Joan, thought it was a good idea.

Kyrle was just 17 and had never held a job. But what he lacked in experience, he made up for in persistence. "I called people in the industry, who were encouraging," he says. "Then I kept talking to my sister until I convinced her." Joni Boldt Ridgway, then 24, single, and a college marketing major, joined him as an equal partner.

With a $10,000 loan from their parents, the young entrepreneurs leased a 600-square-foot building with affordable rent and heavy drive-by traffic. They filled it with used fixtures and cash registers and a cargo of beachwear they ordered from a trade show in California. Boldt created a flier, which a friend printed gratis and other friends distributed at schools all over the county. Then the siblings panicked: Will anyone actually shop here?

They needn't have worried. Word of mouth brought a tidal wave of teenagers to their shop, Splash. The craze for jams--wildly patterned, drawstring Hawaiian shorts--had hit, and Splash was the only store in town selling them.

Splash made money from Day One. Six weeks after its opening, the owners repaid their parents in full. By August, however, they had a problem: No one came to a surf shop for back-to-school clothes. "We knew we couldn't be just a seasonal shop," says Ridgway.

The brother-sister team scouted new clothing lines for fall and winter and expanded their offerings with funky accessories and recreational equipment. Boldt stocked Splash with skateboards just as skateboarding exploded. The two attend seven trade shows a year, and today Splash sells everything from 70 kinds of snowboards to fluorescent bikinis and lime-green nail polish.

Ridgway attributes the phenomenal growth of Splash--five stores in St. Louis, 35 employees, and a doubling of revenues in the past three years--to an intuitive sense of trends and a creative approach to retailing.

The first Splash had a raised dressing-room floor that was a plexiglass aquarium, stocked with live fish. A tie-dyed Volkswagen Beetle is parked at the entrance of their newest shop. "I want kids to feel a sense of excitement when they walk into our stores," says Ridgway, 35.

Their marketing has been equally creative. When Boldt, 28, started selling skateboards, he brought skateboard pros to St. Louis for demonstrations in the parking lot. He also sponsored a skateboard team and for four summers operated a skateboard park in a St. Louis suburb.

Joan Boldt, who started out running the store when her kids were in school, now manages the original Splash. The family patriarch, Bud, a brick supplier, offers advice and help when asked.

The young retailers may open yet another store. At the outset, "a lot of people said we were just a fad and wouldn't last," says Boldt. "Eleven years of a strong business have proved them wrong. But we can't ease up. We constantly have to stay on top of what's happening."